The best way to grasp the significance of what magazines do is to imagine a world in which they didn't exist.

While a book is a hefty chunk of material that we don’t mind paying a correspondingly significant price for, selling paper copies of material that’s only a few pages long would be unwieldy on any number of levels

To begin with, how could articles and essays be presented on their own to consumers?  Newsstands would have to be ten to thirty times their current size to display the same amount of articles they do now.  Then how would the material be priced?  And how would writers arrange to get their short material onto newsstands?  Most important of all, how would consumers know what material was any good?

Magazines as we know them owe their existence to solving these problems.  They enable us to buy a compilation of material from various writers (internal magazine staffers as well as outside freelancers) whose quality is attested to by inclusion in the magazine.  The material comes in a convenient package that newsstand operators know how to display.   It is offered at a standardized price, and appears on a predictable schedule.